Reading: Kicking Against the Left Hemisphere's Hegemony
Few things are more degrading than being a child of the modern age.
“Prison wife” comes closest.
It ain’t our fault we were born into this asphalt dystopia of algorithms and plastic. But we can claw our way out. We can break the chains. The trick is knowing what you’re escaping from, lest you just flail like some half-cocked jihadi spraying buckshot in a crowded room of Jews, blind to the real enemy.
The modern age is a middle finger to everything that can’t be measured, quantified, or shrink-wrapped. I call it the Great Rejection—a civilization-wide lobotomy that’s hacked away half our humanity. Ever since Descartes and his ilk turned the world into a math problem, we’ve been barreling down a dead-end road paved with rationalism and empiricism. The left hemisphere’s in the driver’s seat, clutching its blueprints and opinions.
And the right hemisphere, with its appreciation for mystery and beauty, is tied up in the trunk.
If you want out, you’ve got to reject the Great Rejection. You’ve got to kick your way out of that trunk.
Michel Foucault, that degenerate, had a phrase for it: “counter-conduct.” He was talking about something else, of course, but picking through Foucault’s work is like scavenging a dung heap: you grab what glints and shake off the filth. His own life was such a sordid circus that you can’t trust his words without a hazmat suit. Still, counter-conduct’s the ticket. It’s the act of spitting in the eye of the machine.
Take Jack Kerouac, that beatnik saint, roaring across America’s blacktop veins, chasing kicks and thumbing his nose at the grey-flannel suits. Or J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, smirking at the phonies, kicking over every sacred cow he could find. Hell, even Foucault himself practiced counter-conduct, in his own twisted way, diving headfirst into San Francisco’s bathhouse bacchanals until AIDS cashed his check. Extreme, sure. But they all said no to the machine in their own way.
Fortunately, you don’t need to go that far.
There are less, ahem, rigorous forms of rebellion.
Like reading.
I’m talkin’ real reading, not the kind where you’re skimming for bullet points or mining data for your next TED Talk. I’m talking about slow, aimless reading: cracking open a book and letting it hit you like a stray breeze. You read, something snags your soul, you pause, you ponder, you keep going. The content almost doesn’t matter. It’s the act itself that’s a raised fist against the ticking clock of modernity.
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Eric Scheske
